1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed herein relates to a military vehicle window cover for protecting an underlying windshield, and more specifically to a military vehicle window cover using a combination of mirrors and plates of bullet-proof armor to deflect or stop incoming fire while allowing unobstructed visibility through the vehicle's window.
2. Description of the Background of the Invention
Bullet-resistant glass-pane windows, while offering some improvement to battle zone survivability, have by nature many unwanted traits that have limited their effectiveness at maintaining functionality of a vehicle under fire and safety of the occupants within that vehicle. A bullet-resistant window is a multi-layered assembly of plastic and glass, held in place with a single welded frame and adds hundreds of pounds of excess weight to a vehicle, causing a high cost of replacement when damaged and vehicle performance to suffer due to the added weight. Additionally, with the layered construction of a bullet-resistant window, night vision gear is rendered inoperable and loss of visibility through the window is a certainty due to the shattering of the bullet-resistant glass when projectiles, such as bullets and shrapnel, hit its surface.
Improvements have been made in this art, notably U.S. Pat. No. 5,452,641, which proposes a transparent armor piercing protection system with angled, mirrored louvers in an aperture with a sheet of transparent armor provided adjacent to the aperture. When a projectile strikes the louvers, the louvers will either stop the projectile or cause it to fragment, with the remaining fragments stopped by the adjacent sheet of transparent armor. The solution of louvers themselves does not essentially solve the problems of weight or visibility loss, as each louver is constructed to stop or fragment projectiles, adding to the overall weight and marring the mirrored surface of each louver. Additionally, the adjacent sheet of transparent armor fractures when stopping or deflecting projectiles, and loss of vision still occurs.